Ben Taylor's first concert performance was certainly memorable for him, but it came with the kind of feelings he'd probably like to forget.

"It was completely terrifying, just absolutely terrifying.

"It was like being outside of myself and watching myself suffer," he said with a knowing chuckle during a recent phone interview. "There was no moment of it that was at all elating or even gratifying while I was on stage.

"It was like OK, I just jumped out of the back of a truck that I didn't realize was going 90 miles an hour," he said.

The reason the first show was so traumatic was because Taylor was not the usual anonymous singer just trying to see what it was like to perform live and what kind of reaction his songs might get. His parents — through no fault of their own — made that impossible

That's because when you're the son of music stars James Taylor and Carly Simon, you don't get the option of being an unknown for your first performance. Instead, several hundred people (including a celebrity or two and quite possibly some music business professionals) came out to satisfy their curiosity about this new artist with a stellar pedigree.

"That was the only thing I had to complain about," Taylor said of the attention he received right from his first show forward.

"I had a tremendous amount of exposure and opportunity before I had done anything to earn it myself. And that was really, that was the most painful lesson of my career. I think I've stepped through a lot of doors that had been kicked open for me before I was ready to."

Despite the awkward feelings that came with his entry into the music scene, Taylor has not only survived, he looks to be positioned to enjoy a long career.

He may never have the number of radio hits his parents have had or come close to the arena-filling popularity they have enjoyed. But Taylor is an established artist in his own right, having released his fourth studio CD, "The Listening."

And unlike the sons and daughters of other musicians who have tried to follow in their parents' footsteps, Taylor doesn't shy away from being known as the son of James Taylor and Carly Simon.

He's proud of his lineage and praises the way his parents raised him and kept him grounded, even though they were both very public figures who had divorced after 11 years of marriage, when Ben was all of six years old.

Even so, it took Taylor, 35, time to decide he really wanted to follow in his parents' footsteps and begin a music career.

He didn't start singing until his early 20s, and even then he knew that any other line of work would have been easier to pursue.

"Easy is one of those things that I've always sort of, as much as I appreciate when it comes along, I seldom look for it because so often the easy way turns out to be compromise one way or another," Taylor said. "And anything that I've ever learned too quickly I've usually learned it insufficiently. Or even worse, it's been something shallow to learn. So it's not that I'm afraid of the easy way and it's not that I'm obsessed with the hard way, but I'd rather be sure that I had a strong foundation before I did anything else."

So Taylor took the plunge, but after recording a 1997 CD that wasn't released, "Greed Dragon, Name a Fox," he went another six years before his first CD, "Famous Among the Barns," was released. New music then started to flow at a regular pace.

In 2004, he released "EP #1," followed a year later by his second full-length CD, "Another Run Around the Sun." A second EP, "Deeper Than Gravity," followed in 2006 before Taylor released the thematic album, "The Legend of Kung Folk Part 1 (The Killing Bite)," in 2008.

Then Taylor retreated from the scene, and started what became a four-year gap between albums that is only now ending with the release of "The Listening."

Some of the gap, Taylor said, was created by his own tendency to work on albums and keep tinkering and re-recording songs and not really know when to call an album done. In fact, he said, he could easily have kept working on "The Listening" longer than he did.

"I could still make it six times," he said. "It's just been too long. And now there are so many songs. I mean, there are so many songs that have been written since the collection of songs that are on there that it's time to make another album. And we couldn't do that without finishing this one. And if albums are collections of songs, then I guess one collection tells you it's finished when the next one appears."

Those other songs may surface on another album as soon as this year. That's partly because after self-releasing his earlier albums, Taylor is now signed to a record label, Sun Pedal/Independent Label Group, and the label wants another album next year.

In doing the next CD, Taylor said, he plans to bring in an outside producer just so he stays on track with finishing the album.

"As much as I might contribute (with production) in that sense, I need somebody else with the reins so they can say 'You know what, this is good the way it is. Let's stop,'" Taylor said.

For now, he likes "The Listening" just fine, and the CD is an assured effort that runs from acoustic-based tunes like "Worlds Are Made of Paper" and the title track that aren't that far flung from the music of Taylor's father to the beefier, more soul-accented tune "Oh Brother" to the rambling country touches of "Giulia."

Taylor said with "The Listening," he sees a progression in his music and how it reflects who he is as a person.

"The most significant improvement that I see is in the songs themselves," he said. "I have a real overview of a piece I'm working on now that I never used to have when I was younger. I can see how one part of the song doesn't fit another and how it needs to change very easily. I'm a lot less precious about my own ideas and my skin is a little bit thicker in terms of taking other peoples' advice when something doesn't work.

"I feel like that's like having a loose grip on something, which is the way you to approach something that you're creating,"

Taylor said. "You never want to constrict it or constrain it or contract it. You want to hold onto it, but you want to hold onto it with a loose grip so that it can become what it wants to be for itself."

In fact, Taylor is free enough with his music that he said he is seeing the "Listening" songs evolve in a live setting as he tours with a band that includes bass, drums and another guitarist and is making sure Taylor's lyrics and vocals take center stage in the performances.

"It's a group of sophisticated, mature people, especially for their age, who don't play all the notes they could," Taylor said.

"They get more excited about the spaces they can leave than the actual notes they can play. So the arrangements are succinct and powerful, I think, that way.

"Pretty much we've got a rotation of the new songs off of 'Listening' that we play pretty much every night," he said. "And then the rest of the set is compiled with either brand new stuff that I've written since 'Listening' and old songs. And we just rotate those."

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